Tuesday, July 3, 2018

THE CASE OF THE MARVELOUS MASON MACHINE – Mathew Paust

At long
last it can be alleged:
Perry Mason and his associates were in fact a highly classified cell
of fantastics working undercover for nearly forty years combating
heinous crime and prosecutorial incompetence in Southern California’s
judiciary. Their morally dicey mission:
to
save well-financed damsels in dire distress against unimaginably
implausible odds.

Mason, the
cell’s lead operative posing as a dauntless criminal defense
attorney, sheds light on the mission’s moral dilemma in this brief
exchange with his purported secretary, Della Street, while
considering a potential client’s tale of woe in The
Case of the Rolling Bones:

“‘I
don’t like rich people,’ Mason said, pushing his hands down in
his pockets. ‘I like poor people.’”

“’Why?’
she asked, her voice showing her interest.”

“‘Darned
if I know,’ Mason said. ‘Rich people worry too much, and their
problems are too damn petty. They stew up a high blood pressure over
a one-point drop in the interest rate. Poor people get right down to
brass tacks: love, hunger, murder, forgery, embezzlement— things a
man can sink his teeth into, things he can sympathize with.’”

Moments
later Mason tells the distressed damsel, “If I take this case, I’ll
need money—money for my services, money for investigation. I’ll
hire a detective agency and put men to work. It’ll
be expensive.”

One might
get the notion from these two sentiments Mason didn’t like his
clients, and maybe he ddidn’t. If not, it’s the more to his
credit, as he tells the team’s uncannily effective chief
investigator Paul Drake in their debut published case, that of the
Velvet
Claws,“It’s
sort of an obsession with me to do the best I can for a client.”

Erle
Stanley Gardner, who controlled and chronicled the activities of what
we shall call the Marvelous Mason Machine (MMM for short), gives us
vivid descriptions of these superheros introducing
them in this first of some 80 published cases. Mason, Gardner
confides, “has about
him the attitude of one who is waiting. His face in repose was like
the face of a chess player who is studying the board. That face
seldom changed expression. Only the eyes changed expression. He gave
the impression of being a thinker and a fighter, a man who could work
with infinite patience to jockey an adversary into just the right
position, and then finish him with one terrific punch.”

And later,
“His hand was well formed, long and tapering, yet the fingers
seemed filled with competent strength. It seemed the hand could have
a grip of crushing forceshould
the occasion require.”

The lawyer’s “broad
shoulders” are mentioned frequently, as are references to his
athleticism and pugilistic nature. Sort of startling to encounter
this Perry Mason after years of watching stout, sedentary windbag
Raymond Burr in the TV role inspired by Mr. Gardner’s descriptions.

Similar
startling contrasts are evident with Della Street and Paul Drake. In
the original case files the two are a far cry from their bland
portrayals
on TV
by
Barbara Hale and William Hopper:
Della Street has a slim figure and steady eyes. She’s about
twenty-seven, and appears to be watching life keenly and
appreciatively, seeing “far below the surface.” Her cover story?
She came to work for MMM after her wealthy family “lost all their
money.”

And Drake, who heads the
gargantuan P.I. agency unobtrusively headquartered across the hall
from Mason’s office is tall, with “protruding glassy eyes” that
hold “a perpetual expression of droll humor,” whose shoulders
droop and head thrusts forward on a long neck.

It’s
just now occurred to me that maybe Mr. Gardner was deliberately
misleading us with his team’s physical identities. It’s entirely
reasonable he would wish to protect them in the event of reassignment
to other, perhaps even hairier undertakings
in the eternal struggle for truth, justice, and...so forth. At the
moment, however, MMM’s superpowers are
of greater interest than
their
appearances.

Granted,
on the surface Mason and his crew display attributes one might expect
in top-tier professionals of their kind--or at least which
could
be contained within mortal bounds. Mason’s NFL-linebacker’s
physique, for example, the crushing grip, the pugnacious spirit,
zen-like mental control, and I’m guessing he can make a fairly
decent omelet or poached egg in a pinch. His legal knowledge may seem
superhuman to some, but I would argue this appears so by comparison
with the theatrically dim performances of prosecutors he routinely
opposes. Fortunately Mason’s lawyerly skills are on par with those
of the judges who try his cases—men, of course, as this was a time
when even the formidable Della Street was regarded as “the girl”
by none other than Gardner himself—who always ultimately agree with
Mason despite his penchant for highly irregular courtroom practices.
One might speculate as to whether Mason’s skills extended to some
form of subtle hypnotic spellbinding of these strangely sympatico men
of the bench.

We’re
homing in here on just what it could have been beyond Mason’s
competence, both physical and jurisprudential, that elevated him to
the realm of superherodom. I postulate it was a cerebral brilliance
that impinged upon the outer limits of some mechanical contraption on
the order of, say, the Cray Supercomputer. Could it be that Perry
Mason’s brain was either somehow melded with such a device or else
had been implanted with a microchip that corresponded directly and
instantaneously with some such? Else how could he reach beyond
intuition, invariably with indomitable confidence, to know, for
example, which of the four identities assumed by a suspect in various
contexts was in fact the actual one, as he did in Rolling
Bones?
I mean Mason was supposed to be a lawyer, no? Not Carnac the
Magnificent or Sherlock Holmes, for Pete’s sake!

Which
brings us to Paul Drake, MMM’s detective but most certainly no
Sherlock Holmes, either. Yet Drake NEVER FAILED! Whenever Mason
needed someone shadowed, someone who might at that moment be sitting
across from him in the office, he’d slip a note to Della Street,
who’d slip across the hall to Drake, who’d immediately place an
operative—sometimes waiting right in the building’s elevator--to
tail the person to wherever he or she would
go.
Drake was always in his office when needed for this, and always had
plenty of operatives available at a moment’s notice. And he had
“correspondents” wherever in the world he needed them to pick up
the trail of someone or obtain information the instant Drake
contacted them.

In
The
Case of the Postponed Murder,
Gardner’s last report (published three years after his death in
1970), Drake literally overnight digs up evidence of a check forgery
ostensibly committed by a missing woman Mason’s been hired to find
and help.

Mason
tells his client, claiming to be the woman’s sister, “Go see Paul
Drake. In all probability, one of his operatives can locate your
sister within twenty-four hours. If it turns out your sister is in
any difficulty and she needs legal help, I’ll still be available.”

Next morning Drake tells Mason
what he’d learned about the forgery, and predicts he’ll locate
the woman in two or three hours.

And
we dare
not
overlook Della Street, who played a lower-keyed but equally
effective role for the team. She could whip out a steno pad and take
impeccable notes on what was being said anytime, anywhere. She also
found things the men missed, and sometimes had help from cosmic
convergence. In Rolling
Bones
she and Mason and Drake are musing over a woman Drake’s operatives
have located. They’re not sure but whether the woman’s using a
fake name. While they’re talking, Della Street is perusing the
day’s newspapers’ classifieds. Within minutes, SHAZAM!!, she hits
paydirt. “This what you want? ‘L. C. Conway, 57, to Marcia
Whittaker, 23.’ Notice of intention to wed.”

My word!

I
suppose my admiration for Mr. Gardner’s superheros
would be all the greater had they applied their powers helping the
“poor” people Mason said he preferred to the rich. But that would
be unbelievable. After all how could impecunious clients support the
most effective criminal defense law firm in Southern California and
the largest, quickest, most honest, most successful detective agency
ever known?

Could
this very, very minor oddity have
some bearing on
why Albert Einstein hid his Perry Mason paperbacks behind the heavy
physics tomes in his office at Princeton University? Relatively
speaking, of course? Because that’s where William Tangney,
Princetonian reporter later to become founding editor of Virginia’s
York Town Crier, discovered
them minutes after news of Einstein’s death reached the campus.
Had the great man been honoring MMM’s elitist reputation by keeping
its chronicles’ egalitarian publications discreetly concealed?

7 comments:

I have only read two of the Perry Mason series since I started blogging. One of those was TCOT Rolling Bones, and I found it so complex that I never knew who was who and what was going on. But I always enjoy the main characters... Perry, Della, and Paul. We are watching episodes of the TV series now, just finished the third season, and enjoying those also. I like all three characters in the TV series too, plus Lieutenant Tragg and DA Hamilton Burger.

My lawyer dad made sure we watched every episode back in the day, Tracy. They were great fun. He had a bunch of the original paperbacks, too. Wish I had them now. The only one I can remember by title is TCOT Lucky Legs. Pretty sure I read it as a pre-teen, but I have no recollection of what it was about.

The first one I read, at the age of 12, was TCOT VAGABOND VIRGIN. I was so hooked I read another dozen one after the other. By then I was so oversaturated, it was quite a few years before I read another. But over the decades I've read about 30 of them, most recently in January of this year: TCOT SLEEPWALKER'S NIECE (https://kevintipplescorner.blogspot.com/2018/01/ffb-review-case-of-sleepwalkers-niece.html)

Great post, Mathew. I read most all the Perry Mason books when I was a teen but when I went back to try and reread a couple of years ago, I couldn't get into either of the books I'd picked up. (Can't remember what they were.) Sad to say, there are just some books better left in the past and Perry Mason is apparently it for me. I wish it were otherwise since I know I enjoyed them as a kid. But I disagree with you about Raymond Burr - I loved him as Mason. I loved the rest of the cast as well. I thought your descriptions of the literary Mason fit Raymond Burr pretty well. He had that impassive face thing going on, with intelligence brimming in his eyes. Yeah. And in truth he didn't really get really stout until the series was well along and even then I didn't mind it at all. It suited him. There are Perry Mason movies too, the ones starring Warren William (swoon) are especially hard to find. They are very different from the books and the TV show. At least in memory. :)

Thanks, Yvette. Your defense of Raymond Burr is of Perry Mason caliber! I had the later image in mind when I wrote this, but in the earlier photos I could see he fit the written descriptions better. I should have qualified this as an "impressionistic interpretation" to allow for that discrepancy. But I shall remain firm with the word "windbag." ;)